The need for this arose when I was practicing yesterday, so here we go— two pages of syncopation rhythms including quarter note triplets and inverted quarter note triplets. You know what to do. Get the […]
Category: reading
Reed in 7/4
Another one of my little photoshop* pranks of an existing drum book— here putting some rhythms from Progressive Steps to Syncopation into 7/4 time. It’s fun. * – Actually I do it using Paint.NET. I […]
Syncopation rhythms – dotted quarter note spacing
A page of practice rhythms, with dotted quarter note spaced notes, and no more than two notes in a row with an 8th note spacing. Most of these are already scattered all over the book […]
Gaps in our counting system
In the comments on that extremely valuable izquierdadiddles post, a friend of the site from the Czech Republic remarked on stickings in his native language, and on the American system for counting 16th notes: [We] Czech drummers […]
Three practice rhythms inverted
This is a page I wanted when I was practicing yesterday— whatever I was doing was hard enough that I wanted to see these written out, all together. They’re simple, so they’re good starting independence […]
Louis Bellson reading text in 4/4
Here are CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! we spend a lot of time with the book Syncopation, and not so much with its more expansive, more serious-seeming companion, Louis Bellson’s Modern Reading Text in 4/4. I use […]
Marking up Reed
You know, I think we should all own multiple copies of Syncopation— first because they tend to get destroyed through use, second so we can pencil in our own changes without turning the book into […]
EZ set ups and partial filler
I’m working through this with a student. It’s an easy reading item for the drum set, with a narrow set of parameters, using my tresillo inversions page (lines 1-8 only), my tresillo inversion combinations page, and […]
Syncopation exercise: p. 38 with ties added
One minor gap in the rhythms covered in Syncopation— that’s a drumming book, hahaha omg— is that there aren’t so many syncopated long notes on the “weak” beats, 2 and 4. There are relatively few ties […]
Syncopation exercise: page 38 inverted
A little writing experiment here: I’ve inverted the rhythm from the full page Exercise 1 from Progressive Steps to Syncopation, on p. 38 in current editions, famously on p. 37 from earlier editions. It’s one […]
Reed tweak: four beats per drum, cycling
Here’s an easy way to modernize your melodic phrasing when playing an ordinary thing using Syncopation— everyone knows about playing the melody parts from the book on the snare drum and bass drum, along with […]